Member Geo8 shows us a unique way of using Rrove Sets - creating a memory map. Geo8 created a set of memorable places as he was growing up in Rome. It includes the place where he was born, a playground he used to hang around, the elementary school he was in, and a market he used to frequent.

Memory maps are an interesting and cool way to use Rrove Sets. Other memory maps you can create include past vacations, your cross-country road-trip, or a list of favorite restuarants and bars.

Remember: if you find amazing Rrove sets or places, feel free to recommend them to us. Email us at web@rrove.com and send us a link. If we agree, we’ll post it on the Rrove blog.

The Best of Rrove highlights interesting sets and places that our members have contributed So far, there is no set criteria for it - we simply look for cool content and post them through the Rrove blog for our members to enjoy. We’ll try to get one each week and we’re open to recommendations (you can even suggest yours). Send them to web@rrove.com and label it ‘Best of Rrove.’

This week’s set comes from user Firefox: Letters & Symbols on a Map.

Finding buildings shaped as the letter ‘A’ or the number ‘2′ is nothing special. But finding the whole alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and other keyboard characters (e.g. , ?, etc.) on a Google map is tons of fun. Check out this set for yourself! You have to see it to believe it.

Map your city, introduce yourself and meet other members through the Rrove Community set. Through this set, you can find Rrove users who are close-by and see the places they’ve bookmarked and made public. We hope that this set will help you make new friends and discover new places around your neighborhood.

Adding yourself to the Rrove Community set is quick and easy:

1. Go to the Rrove Community set
   
2. Click on ‘Add new places’
3. Type in your city in the ‘Where’ field and hit ‘Save This Place’
4. Name your city and introduce yourself through the ‘Review’ field.
• Point to a personal blog, a Myspace account or your Rrove user page. You can also add an email address.
• Example – “About Atomu: Passionate about studying ancient philosophy and volunteering at local non-profit organizations. Co-founded Rrove for people to map and share their memories. My Rrove page is http://www.rrove.com/user/atomu.”

Add yourself now! For a complete list of members in an area, visit the set and click the city you are interested in.

Create Sharable Sets

We’ve recently launched sharable sets. Simply put, you can create a set and allow anyone to add and contribute places to it. Here are some ideas on how to use this new feature:

• Make a Local Map: Collaborate with your neighbors and promote your city by identifying the best places to stay, eat and visit.
• Build a Restaurant Directory: Allow friends to list their favorite restaurants and find new places to dine.
• Plan a Vacation: Get your travel group to list the tourist spots they want to visit and the activities they want to do.

Creating a sharable set is easy – simply create a set and keep ‘Allow everyone to add places to this set’ checked.

Here it is (drumroll…) – the shiny new Rrove! Atomu & I have been working a slicker version of our social bookmarking service for places in the last few months. The new Rrove has better features to help you keep, share & discover places. We’ve literally brainstormed, designed, argued, tested, revisited, removed, added-back, changed and tweaked existing and new features on our website. This Rrove is better, faster and easier to use – and we’d like to highlight the happy features we’ve added.

1) New look & logo: the most obvious difference is our look-and-feel. We’ve replaced the clinically white design with color and pictures. We’ve also added a map icon to our brand logo. More than just making cosmetic changes is the way we layout and present user-generated content. In the front page, Rrove highlights the best sets of places and the newly added locations. Click through these items and discover interesting places – no login or user account required.

2) Map-mode: Try adding/sharing a place on Rrove and you’ll see the new Map-mode. The Map-mode uses more browser real estate and defaults into satellite view so you can see how an area looks like from above. You can find really amazing content through this mode (tip: go to a popular place like the Pyramids of Giza, Macchu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, etc.).

We’ve also integrated search to make adding places easier. You probably have the name of that special restaurant in San Francisco but not its full address. Simply type it into the fields we provide and Rrove will look it up for you. When you are ready to save this place, just click on its exact location on the map so you add the right spot.

Rrove Map-mode

3) Places page: Once you’ve saved a place, click and navigate to its dedicated page. You’ll discover a ton of automatically-created content in it. Since you’ve given us the coordinates of an important place, we can scan the web for information related to it. On top of Google Maps’ satellite view and driving directions, you’ll get articles on Wikipedia, pictures on Flickr and events on Eventful.

You can easily create a page full of useful content so we think that its good karma to save and share a place on Rrove. Please add your places, and don’t forget the reviews!

Interesting places:
Eiffel Tower
Burj Al Arab Hotel
Universal Studios Hollywood
Taj Mahal
Luxor Las Vegas

4) Sets of places: So, you’ve added, shared and reviewed your places – what next? With the new Rrove, you can arrange, manage and organize these locations into sets. Present your places your way – make a map of the best restaurants in your city, tourist destinations in an exotic country or strange objects that you found on satellite view. Share your sets with friends so they can benefit from your personal experience and discover new sites. Btw, good ones make it to the front page.

Cool Sets (tip: click the ‘View’ button):
Paris Destinations
Rome: 10 Places to Visit
12 Cool Tech Companies
10 Haunted Houses
15 Spectacular Las Vegas Hotels

5) Friends: Rrove is a community/social network, and we’ve beefed up the functionality that allows our members to interact with each other. There are simple changes such as avatars, user-location associations and member pages. There are also advanced changes. With the Everyone’s Places, you can see the sets and places of all our members. To see ‘expert’ reviews, you can use the new Friends’ Places and drill down to the interesting locations that your friends and close contacts have added.

There are more changes – pretty static urls, snapshot, tag search, social media chicklets, view nearby locations, update official information (to name a few). Stay tune for future posts on these new features. For now give the new Rrove a test-drive and decide for yourself.

Like what you see? Digg It, Bookmark to Del.icio.us or just email your friends.